Bestselling author, award winning brand marketing and social media pro, Cindy Ratzlaff, creates sales driving campaigns for authors, books and publishers.
Take a deep breath. On NBC-TV’s The Today Show, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo announced sweeping redesign to the Twitter platform with a focus on the look of Profile pages and a significant update to the mobile and iPad apps.
The Profile Look: Profile’s will feature a large Header Photo on the right hand side that might remind some users of the look and feel of Facebook.
Finding your brand voice or your entrepreneurial message is a fundamental building block for growing a successful, profitable and sustainable revenue stream for your business.
Understanding and implementing strong, clear messages is easier when you have identified your entrepreneurial voice. There are several different voices with which a business can communicate and choosing one can help you get from the idea stage to the starting line. You’ll add additional voices and messages as your company, product or service matures, but since the start is the most challenging hurdle in any entrepreneur’s business life cycle, let’s examine some options that will get you to go.
I once had a boss who asked me why we published so many books that were not bestsellers. He wanted to know why we didn’t just publish the bestselling ones and reject the rest. It was a naive question, but one that crops up in every industry. Why don’t we all just launch the profitable ideas and not the mistakes? Shouldn’t there be a way to determine if a product or service or book will succeed before we invest time, money and resources in launching?
There isn’t a truly foolproof solution or we’d all be rich, no book would go unread, every product would have thousands of raving fans and marketing would be pointless. But there are questions that publishers and Fortune 500 companies alike ask themselves before they invest in materials, resources, marketing and everything else that goes into bringing a product or service from the idea stage to the marketplace. And, entrepreneurs need to ask themselves those same questions before they launch because their time, money and resources are their primary investment start up tools.
Maximum visibility for your business or brand is both a marketing and a publicity strategy. Here’s a tip that’s easy to implement from my Maximum Visibility Playbook favorites for the week.
Facebook now allows business page admins and owners to pre-schedule their posts up to 6 months in advance. For entrepreneurs and solo-preneurs, this is a time saving tool that will make their social media efforts easier and more efficient.
The help center on Facebook outlines detailed directions, but here are the highlights.
Every day thousands of fantastic articles and marketing ideas for entrepreneurs and small business owners come streaming onto the web, and throughout social media. What’s a busy entrepreneur to do. You can’t read everything. You can email yourself great links to articles you want to read later or save the links to a private circle on G+ or even bookmark them for handy reference. I use the G+ strategy most of the time and add sites that regularly deliver to my Google Reader account.
For those who haven’t yet figured out how to scan the headlines and save the best for later, here are a few ideas are so creative and useful that I want to make sure you don’t miss them. I’ve added short introductory paragraph to tell you why they’re worth your time to click through and read and possibly save. But all of these have ideas that you can use, right now, to amp up the action on your marketing.
I received an email from someone recently asking me for ideas on how they can begin developing their personal branding even though they don’t yet have a business plan or a fully imagined business idea. I was impress they were thinking about branding at this stage of their business development and the question got me thinking about how we can all set up foundational brand elements now that will serve us as we grow an idea into a business.
But how can we brand something that doesn’t exists, you ask? We can’t. But I believe that you are always the brand. So you can and should begin to articulate what the brand of “you” includes.
Facebook’s Promoted Posts launched this morning and the starting price for promoting an individual post is $15.00 and the choices go up to $300.00. According to Facebook, “when you promote a post, it will be shown in the news feeds of more of the people who like your Page than you would reach normally. Friends of the people who have interacted with your post will also be more likely to see the story in their news feeds for up to 3 days from when the post was first created.”
Facebook estimates your $15.00 promoted post will be served up to 2,100 people more than would have seen it through the regular Edgerank system. You can change the lifetime budget even after publication.
2015 UPDATE: Since the writing of this blog post there have been several updates to the Facebook page design. The tab app “boxes” are now located on the left hand side of your page and not displayed underneath the cover photo. All the other instructions, below, are still valid and creating a custom image for your Apps is very easy to do. Any questions about this or other social media marketing strategies can be directed to me on Facebook at https://cindyratzlaff.com/BrandNewBrandYou.
Now that the default landing tab is gone and all tabs are now “views and apps” according to Facebook, brands have an opportunity to customize the image that invites a fan to engage with a custom app.
Custom images for Apps Are the New Advertising on Facebook Fan Pages
There are four boxes “above the fold” on the new Facebook Fan Page Timeline. The first position is occupied by the Photos app. This box position is permanent and cannot be moved to another position. The next three boxes to the right of photos can be moved, customized and featured at will, IF you created the app (or former tab). If it is one of the suite of apps created by Facebook, you cannot change the image. If the app was created by a third party, the option to change the image is controlled by the third party app and you should check with them. But if you created the app, you can change the image.
Step-by-step guide to customizing the app image on your Facebook Fan Page wall.
That’s all there is to it. You can change these images whenever you like and you can feature a new set of custom apps “above the fold” on Facebook Fan Pages whenever you like.
You can post a link directly to your custom app in your timeline and pin it to the top of your page for seven days to give it extra importance. I’ve created some simple custom designs for apps here to show you what’s possible. I’d love to see yours, too, so feel free to post a link to your custom apps below so we can inspire one another.
UPDATE: New Facebook page designs cause a great deal of anxiety for business page owners as we get used to the new look and functionality of our pages. I wrote this update for people during the 2012 redesign. Stay tuned because a new design is rolling out in September 2015.
By now everyone is going through the 5 stages of grief over the loss of default landing tabs as the fact that all Facebook fan pages will convert to the new Facebook Timeline for Pages Design on March 30, 2012 sinks in.
Questions about the content housed on the millions of custom tabs created by businesses and entrepreneurs such as contests, opt-in offers, streaming video channels and e-commerce pages have people scrambling and questioning whether or not Facebook fans pages will be a worthwhile investment for small to mid-sized businesses and entrepreneurs, in both time and money.
All of your custom tabs still exist. You just need to think creatively about how to market them.
As of this writing, all of the content on custom tabs is still live and accessible. The only change has been that you cannot set up a default landing tab for non-fans. So how does a page entice fans to search for and click on a tab now that they are no longer displayed on the left hand side of a page?
Page admins can upload a custom image to represent the tab or app as Facebook is now referring to all tabs. Imagine seeing a series of evocative, engaging images in this 180 x 180 pixel format under the cover photo. Color, words, and images will call out to the reader like carnival barkers. “Come see the amazing offer.”
Page admins can also rearrange the order in which the apps appear. Four apps are “above the fold” and the rest live under the drop down arrow on the right hand side. Three of those app spots are available to admins to highlight the apps of their choice. Photos will always display. So admins can change the view to highlight specials, sales, contests or whichever three apps are most important to a page in any given time period.
I created two simple word images just to illustrate what’s possible. It was easy to upload the new app cover images and I expect to see brands and entrepreneurs doing some very creative work with these images. If you have examples of fun, enticing or downright awesome images fan pages are using to highlight their custom tab offerings, please post their URL below. Let’s amass some examples to inspire one another.
Brands must evolve and expand or they’ll end up losing market share to competitors. Kodak decided to stick with film. You know how that story ended. But how does a brand create logical brand extensions, products and services that are within their wheelhouse, without stretching their human and financial capital to the breaking point. They frequently take baby steps.
When Oreo wanted to capture more of the cookie market, they created the chocolate Oreo and the double stuffed Oreo. They didn’t create wagons. Many authors, entrepreneurs and small business owners struggle with their portfolio of services or products.
You are a brand. Your products or services are your brand offerings. When you add something new to your offerings, that becomes your brand extension.
Let’s say you are a successful author. You’ve written a great book on marketing. You’ve promoted the book with advertising, personal appearances, traditional media and even social media. Your brand, to the consumer, is “marketing expert.” Now you’re ready to add something new to your services. You might add consulting, coaching, webinars or live trainings. But if you were to add a cookbook to your brand, you’d have a great deal of work to do in order to bring people along with you as you evolve your brand from business to baking. BUT, if cooking is your passion and you’re using cooking as a metaphor for blending, mixing and creating a product, you’d have a brand extension. If the book were about your favorite cookie recipes, you’d need a new branding strategy.
It’s possible for a personal brand to evolve and include a wide variety of products and services. However, adding things far afield from a brand’s original DNA is best done once the brand is mature and the brand leader (YOU) is well established and has a strong and loyal following.
For the rest of us, annual evaluation and planning for our emerging brand life cycle is an exercise worth doing. As you plan your growth, ask yourself the following questions:
Brand development is like story telling. Don’t try to take your reader from “Once Upon a Time,” to “the wicked witch was dead” in two steps. Tell the full story. Lead the consumer through your thinking process by offering logical, helpful, inventive product and service development. And, every step of the way, double check to see that your brand development is ringing true with your customer base. Brand storytelling is marketing. Your ideal reader or client isn’t interested in a one sentence story that shouts “buy my product, buy my product.” Your idea consumer wants you to paint a picture or a solution, entertainment or convenience that your product will introduce into their lives. They want to see themselves using the product, reading the book or enjoying your services. Your story should reveal a path from where people are now to where they could go if they do business with you.
When you’re clear about your intentions and you have your marketing story polished, then you can add a brand extension that will resonate with your fan base.